he knew that if you hit
things, they sometimes went away. He hoped that if he could hit his
grandmother's pain right in the middle, it might drive it out.

Sitting-Always uttered a loud cry. Mistaking it for a shout of triumph,
Dusty Star struck her again. This was more than she could bear, and she
uttered such a piercing scream that the boy was startled. Still it
seemed to prove that the thumping was taking effect. He was preparing to
smite her for the third time when his mother came hurrying into the
tepee.

With groans of pain and anger, Sitting-Always explained what had
happened. Naturally Nikana was very angry. She could hardly believe that
the boy could have dared to take advantage of his grandmother's
helplessness to play her so evil a trick. Without waiting to hear his
own account of the matter, she gave him a sound cuff or two, and ordered
him to go at once and fetch Lone Chief, the medicine-man, since Little
Fish had said he could not come.

Only too glad to escape, Dusty Star rushed indignantly out of the tepee.

Lone Chief's tepee lay at some distance from the camp, round the
north-west corner of Eagle Bluff. He was understood to be a great
medicine-man. His medicine, or Supernatural Power, was very strong,
though it was not always that he could be prevailed upon to put it to
the test. Among the many mysterious things about Lone Chief was that no
one could ever say with certainty where he was to be found. Wandering
across vast spaces or journeying to the edge of the world, had got into
his feet. Hunters from the far west would bring tidings of his camp on
the shore of the mighty lake that washes the feet of the Rockies for
half-a-hundred miles. Deep in the North, on the lonely barrens where the
wolves howled at sundown, and the red-fringed pools were a-glimmer in an
unearthly light, his slightly drooping figure might be seen moving
soundlessly in the windy twilight along the deep-worn trails of the
caribou. Or in the torrid south lands where the salt lakes were caked
with brine, and the antelopes, startled by the solitary figure, floated
across the desert like vapours carried by the air, Lone Chief travelled
till he filled his head with the roar of the gulf of Mexico.

To the tepee of this extraordinary, and much-travelled person, Dusty
Star went with a reluctant tread, and a feeling, which, if it was not
exactly fear, was certainly one of awe. When he came at last within
sight of the camp, he saw that